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From the Lips of Boxes

Posted on December 6, 2010

I kind of wish that we’d kept track, over the years, of all the different moving companies whose boxes we’ve received. I could do a little licensing: sell someone the rights to put “the most-used box by Newberry Book Fair donors” on the side. But I suppose some banana company would complain and there’d be all sorts of ruckus.

Anyway, this was a box from Mover One, a company with which I am not familiar. I have no idea what their status in the world of moving is, but I did notice they put a series of “Moving Tips” on the sides of their boxes. And the reason I noticed that was that this box happened to have “Moving Tip #28”. This states:

“Pack books flat in small cartons, alternating bindings. Try to keep each box under 30 lbs.”

It’s so nice occasionally to find that someone else is fighting on the side of the angels. That “alternating bindings” is a bit confusing. Some people like to alternate the side that the spine of the book is on, or maybe it means alternating hardbound books with paperbound books. You DO, of course, want to make sure that books aren’t going to force themselves into the middle of other books, so it’s best to put them back to back. Maybe that’s what they meant.

Doesn’t matter: the main points are that “30 lbs.” and that “small cartons”. Two companies which sent us their libraries packed their magazine collections into yardlong boxes. Very efficient, I’m sure, but in the case of the Life magazine collection, I found out later on that each of these boxes weighed 150 pounds. Yeah, THEY had forklifts.

I do not give extra points, as I have stated before, to those of you who take a box that big and then fill it only one-third full, so it’s easier to lift. I know: you can’t always get a banana box when you need one. But remember: I have to stack these boxes up to get them into the space provided where I work. Full boxes can be stacked in nice, stable piles. Boxes one-third full tilt and take out innocent bystanders. (I don’t know where we find all these innocent bystanders; I think the library keeps bystanders on standby.)

So it was a nice box, with its heartwarming moving tip. The donor gets one Booky Point for warming my heart and helping me write a blog. But that’s all, because they didn’t actually READ the moving tip. The box they sent was clearly labeled MEDIUM CARTON, with the recommendation that it be used for clothes and such. It was filled about one-fourth full, though, so it would be easy to lift.

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